Online news and serendipitous discovery - significant findings from Pew
Significant findings on accidental exposure to online news from the latest Pew report:
“To get a sense of the different approaches employed by online news users, and how active or passive online news consumption is, we asked how often online news users:
Go online specifically to get news?
Come across news while they are online doing other things?
Get news forwarded to them through email, automatic alerts and updates, or posts on social networking sites
The answers to these questions reveal that it is most common for online news users to chance upon news while they are online doing other things—what could be called “serendipitous” news consumption. Eight in ten online news users (80%) say this happens at least a few times a week, including 59% who say this happens everyday or almost everyday. Only slightly less common, however, is the hunting and gathering approach to online news consumption. About seven in ten online news users (71%) say they go online specifically to get news at least a few times a week, including almost half (48%) who say they do this everyday or almost everyday.
Meanwhile, a smaller segment of online news users say that news finds them—44% get news forwarded to them through email, automatic updates and alerts, or posts on social networking sites at least a few times a week, which includes 28% who receive news everyday or almost everyday. One quarter of online news users (25%) say they never have news forwarded to them.”
Though the numbers are likely to be a great deal smaller when it comes to specifically political information (something which Pew didn’t examine), it’s good to see some basic data coming through about this aspect of the contemporary web.
I argued in a journal article published last year that increased accidental exposure was potentially one of the most significant—and under-explored—changes associated with web 2.0 and online social networking sites.
This hypothesis also forms the core of the grant application that my colleague, Oliver Heath and I submitted last year to the Leverhulme Trust to study Twitter and the UK election.
We should hear any day now whether we’ve been successful. The wheels turn slowly—and often not at all—in the world of grant funding. Fingers crossed.
